Recycle Your Ex

* My unidentified narcolepsy/lyme disease/hibernation disorder continues. I am tired. All the time. Perhaps my immune system is tied to the stock market and since everything has bottomed out, I’m on the verge of collapse.

* Did you see Natalie Martinez’s story about the parties people attend with their ex-lovers, then try to talk them up to other prospective dates? Cool idea. Now all I need is to find someone willing to date and dump me so that they can promote me to someone else… who will probably break up with me and try to pass me along to some other hapless girl, who will do the same. It’s like that awful Christmas gift your grandma gave you and you just keep rotating it among your family members.

* Natalie’s story includes a woman who refers to herself as a “lifestyles expert.” Do you have to go to college for that?

* After we ran Natalie’s story last night, we invited our viewers to “log on” to nbcchicago.com. When’s the last time you used the phrase “log on” in regard to the internet? (“You know, Jane, I was using my personal computer to connect to the information superhighway and I launched Netscape Navigator and pointed my browser to h, t, t, p, colon, backslash, backslash, double-u, double-u, double-u, dot, n, b, c, chicago, dot, com where I logged on to experience their graphic user interface.”)

* What do you get when you mix a redneck and a newspaper editorial about the country’s first black president? Failure.

* Sarah Palin is making the media rounds this morning, hitting “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America” and pretty much every other outlet. Strike while the iron is hot, Governor. I have a feeling we will totally forget about her in a year or so. You’ll be sitting on your porch with your best friend, trying to remember what all the fuss was about. (“Hey, Tom. Remember that lady everybody got freaked out about last year?” “Oh, yeah. What was her name?” “I don’t remember, but I think I saw a commercial about how she’s supposed to box Tonya Harding on Fox this weekend.” “Oh, right. And the undercard has Screech fighting Drew Peterson.”)

* The upcoming city budget includes… you guessed it… more taxes. Good. Because I have all this extra money lying around and I was just wondering how to give it to a government agency.

* Apparently, when you’re governor, you get all sorts of fun gifts. The ratio of gift-givers to felons is actually pretty high. (My favorite gift description is the thing that came from the Emir of Qatar: “silver ram (or goat; no one’s sure) mounted on base, unknown value.”

* Man, it has been a crazy-slow news week. On days when you have one gigantic story (i.e. the election), you’re flush with information. But the day after, all the journalists are sleepy or something, because they don’t crank out anything fresh. It’s all just a look back at what happened the day before. If we weren’t tracking Obama like he was Britney Spears mid-meltdown, we wouldn’t be able to fill our newscasts. (Likewise, let’s count how long the Trib and Sun-Times keep cranking out “special editions” dedicated to our new president. He’s the only thing to move newspaper in this city since people learned it made good kindling.)